Considering the hundreds of billions put in to nuclear R&D that is unlikely to be true. If the same amount had been put into renewables we would probably be mostly coal free by now.
It's easy to "what if", isn't it? The best part is nobody can prove you wrong. But given that Germany have spent about 100 billion so far on solar panels alone, and are still absolutely nowhere near coal free, that seems extremely unlikely. In fact they're building more coal plants.
Also, hundreds of billions for R&D? Maybe that much for total construction costs of plants, but not R&D.
Nuclear got all that free funding due to its usefulness as a weapon.
You can't readily make a nuclear weapon out of a light water reactor. If weapons were what it was about, the world's power reactors would all have online refuelling.
Why does it seem more natural though? -ed is the regular past tense ending, and there aren't any other verbs that spring to mind with an -eek -> -uck sound change for the past tense.
FORTRAN: King of the performance hill, but so annoying to use that nobody really does outside some scientific circles.
F90's not so bad, it got rid of most of the nastiness of F77 - or at least made it non-compulsory.
These ultra-high level languages like Python are all very practical, but are so abstracted that it doesn't even feel like programming to me, more like connecting together pre-built black boxes. Where's the fun in that?
TFA is just one example of "digital"'s abuse, but it's ubiquitous. That word is now so rarely used in any connection with its meaning,
Yes, it seems to just mean "on the internet" or "on a computer" now. I've seen DVDs for sale with the claim "includes digital copy". Silly me with my old analogue DVDs...
AMD might have made okay CPU's but their partners made junk. You simply can't buy quality motherboards for AMD. All of it seems to be low-end crap with weird flaws. Every AMD system I have put together I wound up regretting. Things would crash randomly, freeze randomly, or just act downright strange.
That matches my experience with the Thunderbird and the crappy VIA supporting chipsets. Perhaps it's unfair to use a single bad experience to write off an entire company, but it really soured me on AMD. Never had any trouble with Intel, and I can't be bothered dealing with the uncertainties.
For example, instead of researching the basic nature of matter, we could be trying to build self-replicating nanoscale machinery
That would be engineering, not science. You don't learn anything about nature by doing that.
And we do spend a hell of a lot more on almost everything than particle physics. When I worked in the field, the budget for particle physics and astronomy was less than 0.02% or so of GDP for my country.
Not all kinds of aliasing. The one the grandparent described would be a problem even with continuous sampling - it's caused by taking the Fourier transform over a finite length (L) window. Any frequencies which aren't integer multiples of 1/L will be aliased into ones which are.
I think we're describing the same thing. This phenomenon is just another, less familiar type of aliasing - the "spread of frequencies" you mention will give exactly the same signal in the sampling window as the pure sine wave with a frequency that's a non-integer multiple of 1/the window size, so there's no way for any algorithm to distinguish them. The only way to do that is take your Fourier transform over a larger window, at least for arbitrary input data.
The interesting thing is that the greater time window over which the FFT operates, you can observe finer frequency detail within that particular window at the expense of how quickly the graph or bars change over time (in simplistic terms). I wonder how this new algo will change the frequency detail/transient time detail trade-off. Do we see more detail in both domains? Less? The same?
That's a consequence of a fundamental mathematical relationship between the frequency and time domains and has nothing to do with the algorithm itself. A signal of length L can be exactly represented by a Fourier series of frequencies 0, 1/L, 2/L, 3/L... etc., with nothing in between, so there's no finer detail to see.
EXACTLY. And even then the problems in Japan were entirely due to massively retarded design. How hard is it to understand that you need a huge concrete containment dome over your reactor vessel? Even if everything asplode in a truly magnificent clusterfuck, the radiation isn't going anywhere. It's all staying under that huge concrete dome. Re: Three Mile Island.
No it won't, not necessarily. Without some form of heat removal, the fuel's decay heat will continue to heat and pressurise the containment atmosphere until eventually its failure pressure is exceeded. This doesn't necessarily take long - hours to days maybe. A big dome will give more time than a small one like at Fukushima, but still not enough to just sit back and relax. This is why the recently approved AP1000 reactor essentially has a cooling tower built into the containment structure - air is allowed to flow naturally over a wettened steel shell to take the heat away, with no power needed. The vast majority of reactors in operation do not have such a design though.
How does the lockin stop a phone costing that much? It simply shifts the method of payment from an upfront cost to one spread over the length of a phone contract or more.
I assume you don't think we should still have to use a landline phone rented from the phone company rather than bought, do you?
They are both, subsidized AND taxed. Not everywhere in the same way, though. Did you know the UK subsidizes oil extraction in the north sea? The reason is of course cronyism and corruption.
Do they? Do you have a source? I'd be genuinely surprised if that were true, last I knew there were quite heavy taxes on North Sea oil production - see here for example.
While I've no desire to defend Apple, they're certainly not the only ones. I had to threaten to report Dell to trading standards before they'd replace my faulty monitor ~ 15 months after purchase. Sorry Dell, you can't get round the law by saying "one year warranty only" - a monitor should last more than 15 months, full stop.
One involves the splitting of the nucleus into two roughly equally sized (I said *roughly*, pedants), and the other involves the emissions of much smaller particles such as alphas or betas. Fission in a nuclear power sense usually refers to that induced by neutron capture in a chain reaction, though there is a small amount of spontaneous fission for certain isotopes. The energy released by fission is much larger than from a typical decay.
For the pile of molten crap that the cores now consist of, almost all of the heat production is through decay, not fission.
No it's not, I bought some earlier today. It's just pharmacy only, so you can't buy it in supermarkets or the like (unless they have a separate pharmacy).
Even if such a thing could be done (and it would be a pretty desperate approach, there are easier ways), It would be unlikely to lower the per-capita emissions. After all, all these extra people would have to be supported with the same industrial system as the rest of the population, with a corresponding increase in consumption of all kinds, increasing emissions.
With a total approach, someone could game the system by wiping out a large fraction of their population (or encouraging emigration). But that's not too likely either.
I don't think anyone's actually proposed putting per-capita values into the treaty as the measure by which emissions reductions are calculated. But it's a useful number to assess the relative blame of different countries, and how much they can be reasonably expected to reduce emissions.
No, you will have proven that you cannot detect it and under the circumstances you are very sure that the teapot is not there. However, it is not a proof in a strict mathematical sense.
It's not a mathematical proof no, but then a detection of the teapot wouldn't be a mathematical proof of its existence either. The original claim was that science could prove the existence of something but not its absense, which isn't correct.
Per capita makes sense if you start with the assumption that every human in the world intrinsically has equal rights, including an equal right to emit CO2. If you assume that some have a right to emit more than others, then it doesn't.
Surface area doesn't make sense - current global warming is caused by human industrial activity, not land.
Having an emissions limit per country implies we could halve the problem by splitting each country in two, with half the population going to each. National borders are arbitrary from a geographical perspective.
To take someone else's example, imagine the flying teapot in orbit some where in the solar system, you cannot disprove that it is there.
If your teapot has certain properties (minimum size, interacts with electromagnetic radiation for example), you could scan the solar system with apparatus known to be sensitive enough to detect such an object. If, after scanning the entire solar system in this way, you find nothing, then you have proved that the teapot isn't there.
Similarly, the Higgs has certain properties (otherwise it wouldn't be the Higgs), and we know that the LHC is ultimately sensitive enough to detect particles with those properties.
I didn't realise I was publishing a scientific paper. I *thought* I was responding to one anecdote with another.
The "OMG you don't have a NAT you're going to get pwned" fearmongers are fond of using anecodes of unpatched XP boxes being hacked within seconds. If that was still such a problem, it shouldn't have been possible for even a single user such as myself to have an out-of-the-box Windows install connected directly to the itnernet for months without being hacked. Simple statistics should say that if there's a significant chance of getting hacked in minutes, the chances of surviving for months must be utterly negligible, to the point where a single counterexample *is* relevant.
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No they haven't. Or did you have a source for that?
Indeed I do.
Considering the hundreds of billions put in to nuclear R&D that is unlikely to be true. If the same amount had been put into renewables we would probably be mostly coal free by now.
It's easy to "what if", isn't it? The best part is nobody can prove you wrong. But given that Germany have spent about 100 billion so far on solar panels alone, and are still absolutely nowhere near coal free, that seems extremely unlikely. In fact they're building more coal plants.
Also, hundreds of billions for R&D? Maybe that much for total construction costs of plants, but not R&D.
Nuclear got all that free funding due to its usefulness as a weapon.
You can't readily make a nuclear weapon out of a light water reactor. If weapons were what it was about, the world's power reactors would all have online refuelling.
Why does it seem more natural though? -ed is the regular past tense ending, and there aren't any other verbs that spring to mind with an -eek -> -uck sound change for the past tense.
FORTRAN: King of the performance hill, but so annoying to use that nobody really does outside some scientific circles.
F90's not so bad, it got rid of most of the nastiness of F77 - or at least made it non-compulsory.
These ultra-high level languages like Python are all very practical, but are so abstracted that it doesn't even feel like programming to me, more like connecting together pre-built black boxes. Where's the fun in that?
As for the emissions of a gasoline engine. Those emissions are much higher, and much more deadly.
Not any more - diesels produce vastly more particulate matter and nitrogen oxides.
That comic is annoying. Feynman was very hot on rigour - just read his comments on psychologists' experiments in one of his books, for example.
There's no point doing an experiment if you aren't going to do it well enough to reliably draw a conclusion.
Digital is not the defining characteristic of that secondary copy, as the main DVD content is also digital. So the adjective is useless.
TFA is just one example of "digital"'s abuse, but it's ubiquitous. That word is now so rarely used in any connection with its meaning,
Yes, it seems to just mean "on the internet" or "on a computer" now. I've seen DVDs for sale with the claim "includes digital copy". Silly me with my old analogue DVDs...
AMD might have made okay CPU's but their partners made junk. You simply can't buy quality motherboards for AMD. All of it seems to be low-end crap with weird flaws. Every AMD system I have put together I wound up regretting. Things would crash randomly, freeze randomly, or just act downright strange.
That matches my experience with the Thunderbird and the crappy VIA supporting chipsets. Perhaps it's unfair to use a single bad experience to write off an entire company, but it really soured me on AMD. Never had any trouble with Intel, and I can't be bothered dealing with the uncertainties.
Not remotely close - it's more like 7%, and most of that is in the local, low voltage section rather than the long distance transmission.
For example, instead of researching the basic nature of matter, we could be trying to build self-replicating nanoscale machinery
That would be engineering, not science. You don't learn anything about nature by doing that.
And we do spend a hell of a lot more on almost everything than particle physics. When I worked in the field, the budget for particle physics and astronomy was less than 0.02% or so of GDP for my country.
Not all kinds of aliasing. The one the grandparent described would be a problem even with continuous sampling - it's caused by taking the Fourier transform over a finite length (L) window. Any frequencies which aren't integer multiples of 1/L will be aliased into ones which are.
I think we're describing the same thing. This phenomenon is just another, less familiar type of aliasing - the "spread of frequencies" you mention will give exactly the same signal in the sampling window as the pure sine wave with a frequency that's a non-integer multiple of 1/the window size, so there's no way for any algorithm to distinguish them. The only way to do that is take your Fourier transform over a larger window, at least for arbitrary input data.
The interesting thing is that the greater time window over which the FFT operates, you can observe finer frequency detail within that particular window at the expense of how quickly the graph or bars change over time (in simplistic terms). I wonder how this new algo will change the frequency detail/transient time detail trade-off. Do we see more detail in both domains? Less? The same?
That's a consequence of a fundamental mathematical relationship between the frequency and time domains and has nothing to do with the algorithm itself. A signal of length L can be exactly represented by a Fourier series of frequencies 0, 1/L, 2/L, 3/L... etc., with nothing in between, so there's no finer detail to see.
EXACTLY. And even then the problems in Japan were entirely due to massively retarded design. How hard is it to understand that you need a huge concrete containment dome over your reactor vessel? Even if everything asplode in a truly magnificent clusterfuck, the radiation isn't going anywhere. It's all staying under that huge concrete dome. Re: Three Mile Island.
No it won't, not necessarily. Without some form of heat removal, the fuel's decay heat will continue to heat and pressurise the containment atmosphere until eventually its failure pressure is exceeded. This doesn't necessarily take long - hours to days maybe. A big dome will give more time than a small one like at Fukushima, but still not enough to just sit back and relax. This is why the recently approved AP1000 reactor essentially has a cooling tower built into the containment structure - air is allowed to flow naturally over a wettened steel shell to take the heat away, with no power needed. The vast majority of reactors in operation do not have such a design though.
How does the lockin stop a phone costing that much? It simply shifts the method of payment from an upfront cost to one spread over the length of a phone contract or more.
I assume you don't think we should still have to use a landline phone rented from the phone company rather than bought, do you?
They are both, subsidized AND taxed. Not everywhere in the same way, though. Did you know the UK subsidizes oil extraction in the north sea? The reason is of course cronyism and corruption.
Do they? Do you have a source? I'd be genuinely surprised if that were true, last I knew there were quite heavy taxes on North Sea oil production - see here for example.
While I've no desire to defend Apple, they're certainly not the only ones. I had to threaten to report Dell to trading standards before they'd replace my faulty monitor ~ 15 months after purchase. Sorry Dell, you can't get round the law by saying "one year warranty only" - a monitor should last more than 15 months, full stop.
One involves the splitting of the nucleus into two roughly equally sized (I said *roughly*, pedants), and the other involves the emissions of much smaller particles such as alphas or betas. Fission in a nuclear power sense usually refers to that induced by neutron capture in a chain reaction, though there is a small amount of spontaneous fission for certain isotopes. The energy released by fission is much larger than from a typical decay.
For the pile of molten crap that the cores now consist of, almost all of the heat production is through decay, not fission.
No it's not, I bought some earlier today. It's just pharmacy only, so you can't buy it in supermarkets or the like (unless they have a separate pharmacy).
Even if such a thing could be done (and it would be a pretty desperate approach, there are easier ways), It would be unlikely to lower the per-capita emissions. After all, all these extra people would have to be supported with the same industrial system as the rest of the population, with a corresponding increase in consumption of all kinds, increasing emissions.
With a total approach, someone could game the system by wiping out a large fraction of their population (or encouraging emigration). But that's not too likely either.
I don't think anyone's actually proposed putting per-capita values into the treaty as the measure by which emissions reductions are calculated. But it's a useful number to assess the relative blame of different countries, and how much they can be reasonably expected to reduce emissions.
No, you will have proven that you cannot detect it and under the circumstances you are very sure that the teapot is not there. However, it is not a proof in a strict mathematical sense.
It's not a mathematical proof no, but then a detection of the teapot wouldn't be a mathematical proof of its existence either. The original claim was that science could prove the existence of something but not its absense, which isn't correct.
Per capita makes sense if you start with the assumption that every human in the world intrinsically has equal rights, including an equal right to emit CO2. If you assume that some have a right to emit more than others, then it doesn't.
Surface area doesn't make sense - current global warming is caused by human industrial activity, not land.
Having an emissions limit per country implies we could halve the problem by splitting each country in two, with half the population going to each. National borders are arbitrary from a geographical perspective.
To take someone else's example, imagine the flying teapot in orbit some where in the solar system, you cannot disprove that it is there.
If your teapot has certain properties (minimum size, interacts with electromagnetic radiation for example), you could scan the solar system with apparatus known to be sensitive enough to detect such an object. If, after scanning the entire solar system in this way, you find nothing, then you have proved that the teapot isn't there.
Similarly, the Higgs has certain properties (otherwise it wouldn't be the Higgs), and we know that the LHC is ultimately sensitive enough to detect particles with those properties.
I didn't realise I was publishing a scientific paper. I *thought* I was responding to one anecdote with another.
The "OMG you don't have a NAT you're going to get pwned" fearmongers are fond of using anecodes of unpatched XP boxes being hacked within seconds. If that was still such a problem, it shouldn't have been possible for even a single user such as myself to have an out-of-the-box Windows install connected directly to the itnernet for months without being hacked. Simple statistics should say that if there's a significant chance of getting hacked in minutes, the chances of surviving for months must be utterly negligible, to the point where a single counterexample *is* relevant.